Modeling the Calculation of Lateral Accelerations in Railway Vehicles as a Tool of Alignment Design

Railway track alignment Standards set a minimum lenght value for straight and circular alignments (art. 5.2.9.), in order to ensure passenger ride comfort in railway vehicles of which dynamic oscillations will thus have to be limited. The transitions between alignments can cause abrupt changes (usually called discontinuities or singular points of the alignment) of curvature, of rate of change of curvature or of rate of change of cant. A passenger is likely to experience effects due to the excitation of the elastic suspension of the vehicle which generates oscillations that are damped as the vehicle moves away from the singularity. The amplitude of these oscillations should be adequately attenuated by the damping of the suspension system within the interval between two successive singular points, especially to avoid resonances. Therefore minimum lengths between two successive singular points are stated in alignment standards. Nevertheless, these nonnative values can be overly conservative in some cases. As an alternative, track alignment designers could try to assess how much the excitation has been attenuated between two successive singular points and thus assess at which point a new singularity may be present without affecting ride comfort. Although such assessment can be made with commercial SW packages which simulate the dynamic behavior of a vehicle considered as a set of rigid bodies interconnected with elastic elements simulating the suspension systems (such as SIMPACK, ADAMS or VAMPIRE), a simplified and user-friendly computation method (based upon the analytical solution of differential equations governing the phenomenon) is made available in this paper to track design engineers, not always used to working with full dynamic models.